Google finally has achieved the Quantum computer supremacy

It’s been a very long, researchers and scientists are working Quantum physics or quantum mechanics to create a device that would be far more superior than any existing SuperComputer on this earth. It sounds like some science fiction movie, however, recently, a press release by the Google opened multi-horizons in the world of Quantum. They have announced that finally, the researchers in Google have created a Quantum computer.

NASA and other big institutions use multiple supercomputers to achieve a high level of complexed calculations. However, these supercomputers seem dwarf in front of a single quantum computer in terms of power and calculation speed.

Google quantum computing that has achieved the quantum supremacy is on the way to enable computing power in a whole new dimension. Such a step has been expected for many years and now this milestone has finally been officially achieved. But at the same time Google CEO Sunder Pichai mentioned, indeed it is a great achievement, however, it should take care and use wisely.

What is quantum supremacy?

Quantum supremacy is a term that refers to the ability of a device that to solve or compute calculations that would not have been possible with another classical computer or supercomputer in a reasonable amount of time, or not at all. In fact, the Google quantum computer should have solved the gigantic task in just three minutes, for which the most powerful supercomputer would take more than 10,000 years. In the truest sense of the word a quantum breakthrough.

The Processor used by Google in its Quantum computing called Sycamore Processor, which is a fully programmable 54-qubit processor that integrated into a 2-dimension grid where each qubit is connected to four other qubits. As a result, the chip has ample connectivity that the qubit states quickly communicate throughout the whole processor, making the overall state impossible to emulate efficiently with a classical computer.

Sycamore processor chip
Google quantum computer Sycamore-processor
Process-illustration-for-quantum-supremacy

See the official Blog to know more about it- Post 1 and Post 2


Words of Sundar Pichai during the introduction of Google’s Quantum Supremecy to the world:

A computation that Quantum does in seconds would take the world’s fastest supercomputer years or thousands of years. It’s a really important milestone, for many years practical quantum computing was only theoretically possible but  Google’s team has proven it can work. This is the hello world moment for quantum computing that many of us have been waiting for, at the same time, we know that we are still in early days, we are still likely years away from a lot of the practical applications we do with Quantum computing.

In classical computing, we are dealing with bit states of 0 and 1 or ON and OFF state but in quantum computing, we depend on something called qubits a counterpart of the classical binary bit system (Know more about quantum bits) which can exist in a superposition of both states 0 and 1 at once though typically only for very short periods of time. This means that calculations are more prone to errors especially as you scale up qubits. Also to understand how complex is it, just know that it requires operations to be done in very cold temperatures, in fact, the machine operates at temperatures that are colder than any naturally occurring place in the known universe.

With the right outcome of Quantum computing, gives us a chance to not only achieve many practical use cases but also help us to make the world better in a way that we cannot do just with classical computers alone. Furthermore, it also allows us to understand the universe in a deeper way, a way in which it actually works and that’s something really excites us now.

Although breakthrough is a sensation, at the same time, we also have to understand yet we are at the tip of the iceberg and the full mountain is still there to explore, I mean to say Google’s engineers just have begun and to fully understand and use the quantum computer, decades could pass. However, at least we got a start from somewhere and that is itself a milestone in the world of computing.